CHRISTIE PITS Park
Sunday, july 21, 2024

someone lives here

With the short films The Repair Shop (L'atelier) and Mathilde and the Love Room

Confronted with Toronto’s housing crisis, increasingly high rates of homelessness, an underfunded, overenrolled shelter system, and draconian police evictions of encampments in parks and other public spaces, carpenter Khaleel Seivwright took matters into his own skilled hands. Local filmmaker and 2024 TOPS Spotlight Filmmaker Zack Russell’s feature documentary début Someone Lives Here (winner of the Hot Docs 2023 Rogers Audience Award for Best Canadian Documentary) follows Seivwright as he goes about his work engineering, building, installing, and repairing over a hundred tiny shelters that offer a warm, private, secure living space for Toronto’s unhoused citizens facing harsh winter conditions. In the process, the tiny shelter project attracted both international acclaim and municipal ire, culminating in a cease and desist from the City of Toronto. Russell’s understated, observational cinematography interweaves Seivwright’s diligent work and frustrating encounters with bureaucracy with the stories of unhoused citizens and frontline support workers. The result is an infuriating and inspiring call to arms for a more compassionate approach to one of the most urgent issues facing our city.

Montréal documentarian Chantal Limoges directs her lens to Belgium’s capital Brussels, another city dealing with a housing crisis. Her short Mathilde and the Love Room highlights the work of another ordinary citizen doing what she can to help. Limoges’ subject is Madame Mathilde, an indefatigable public health nurse whose vocation is tending to the needs of people living on the street. This work extends to furnishing her backyard guest house as a private space for unhoused couples who otherwise have nowhere to go for respite and intimacy, a poignant affirmation of their fundamental human dignity. Back in Canada, filmmaker Namaï Kham Po’s short documentary L’atelier (The Repair Shop) centres on a pair of queer women mechanics who operate a garage in Bâtiment 7, a collectively-run community space located in an old railyard in Pointe Saint-Charles, Montréal. The shop offers a much-needed refuge from the sexism, racism, and homophobia experienced by workers and customers alike in the auto repair business; maintaining this radically inclusive alternative is more than a job, it is a vocation. Together, these three films about the intersection of activism and professional calling paint a rich portrait of the hard, often invisible, work of providing community care, navigating institutional barriers, and building spaces that feel like home.

This screening will be presented with optional pre-recorded Audio Description available for blind, low vision, or visually impaired audience members. More information about this accessibility feature is available at TOpictureshow.com/audio. Other accessibility features available at TOPS events, including open captioning, are outlined at TOpictureshow.com/accessibility.